Extry, Extry! Dead Tree Blog Hits the Streets!

"The world's first daily newspaper composed entirely of blogs and other user generated content....it reads and functions like a web feed-yet can still be enjoyed on the train or spread across the breakfast table, for an uninterrupted, pleasurably tactile experience."

But is it green?

I thought it was a spoof, really, but there are actual offices and people working, albeit volutneers on their own laptops. And the founder, Joseph Karp, thinks there is a market for a twice-a-day paper, and tells the New York Times:

"We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content," he said. "There were so many techniques that I've seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry."

Volunteers working for The Printed Blog on their personal laptops. About 300 blogs have given the paper permission to publish their work, saving the company the cost of paying reporters. Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

The Times notes that: Mr. Karp will still need to pay for paper, ink and contractors to print and distribute the papers. Those costs add up, which is one reason the Internet spawned bloggers in the first place.Seth Godin doesn't think much of the future of printed newspapers.

The reality is that this sort of [serious, investigative] journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction. The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don't care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical. It's like 6 divided by zero. Infinity.

I'm not worried about how muckrakers will make a living. Tree farmers, on the other hand, need to find a new use for newsprint.